“Do you think we’ll still be doing this in ten years’ time, when we’re like, thirty?!”

Although our early ’90s post-club antics seemed chaotic and spontaneous at the time, there were certain things amongst our group that you could set your watch by. At 3am one person would dream up a new and dangerous way of ingesting more drugs – acid in the eyeball, Es up the bum and the slightly more creative ‘Rising Amyl Blow Back’. At 4am someone (usually the recipient of the R.A.B.B.) would suggest everyone get naked; by 5am one girl would start getting emotional and start talking about her relationship with her father. Come six, when the hijinks had slowed and we’d entered the gurning on the sofa stage, one bloke in particular would always ask the above question. It was annoying, as it allowed an unwanted dose of reality into the party. Another bloke would always declare he was “hardcore till I die” – he was never going to stop, and to be fair to him, he hasn’t. Yet not one of us said “I’m go to carry on until my late thirties, then really get into cooking”.

I have been ‘out of the game’ for a few years now and, as my generation hits their forties, I must admit to a mild obsession with what people will do next. What happens when the lure of nightclubbing fades and weekends spent competing in the Ketamine Olympics leaves you unable to function before Wednesday?

How do you replace the rave?

And why have so many chosen cooking?

Looking back now it is much easier to observe this transition. Training for and running marathons are popular pastimes. Practising yoga is another. Aromatherapy courses and doing re-edits of old disco records also feature. Of course, there is also reproducing and then posting pictures of your kids looking cute, which can eat up a lot of hours in the day. Golf used to be a cosy way to slip into middle age, but it doesn’t seem to hold much allure for ex-ravers. I blame tinnitus; golf requires balance, something that’s hard to achieve when you’ve 20 years of nightclub abuse ringing in your ears.

And thus, food. For a while, Danny Rampling was all set to hang up his headphones and open a restaurant; Norman Cook has invested in, and even done a couple of shifts, at New York’s excellent Spotted Pig. James Murphy has a Facebook album called ‘The Gout’, showing pictures of the fine wines he has drunk on his post-LCD Soundsystem travels. Matt Edwards, who once worked with the band at EMI, has just opened his own restaurant after a successful run on Masterchef.

Of course, in the early ’90s cooking wasn’t the enormous industry it is now. In the ’80s, DJ & chef were both fairly functional occupations: a bit of a hobby, perhaps, but certainly neither would have featured much at the careers office. We were just starting to witness the rise of the superstar DJ, but it would be another ten years before chefs were elevated to a similarly lofty status – somewhere just below the gods.

One reason for this swap from the decks to the oven is that a DJ’s sense of superiority is easily transferred to the kitchen. Even in the glory days of dance music there was a healthy dose of ‘it’s not as good as it used to be’ flying around. Especially with the phenomenal rise of EDM in America, the modern nightclub experience seems completely alien to the old-school dance head. In the past, building a record collection required time, passion, commitment and love; you can now download a lifetime’s worth of amazing records in an hour. Playing a set used to require skill and concentration; now, it seems you just hit play and then start showing off to the crowd watching and cheering your every move.

DJs like nothing more than over-stating the importance of their role. Perhaps it’s the frequent criticism that “you’re just playing someone else’s records” that got us all defensive. But if you take the analogy that an old-school DJ set was like creating a perfect meal, balancing and blending flavours and sensations to create a magical experience, then modern DJ culture seems a bit like throwing Pop-Tarts at excitable teenagers. In fact, the climax of EDM superstar Steve Aoki’s sets involves him throwing cakes at the crowd, who are only too eager to feel the sugary icing hit them in the face. A perfect excuse for eye rolling and tutting for the generation bought up on Tony Humphries and Harvey.

The well-travelled DJ will also have experienced some of the finest restaurants, taken there by promoters eager to impress. In the later years of my DJ career, I was lucky to be treated to some amazing pre-gig meals. The downside of this was trying to look ‘up for it’ to the crowd while I was struggling with indigestion. I was often offered drugs, but never what I really needed… Rennies.

Cooking also provides a healthy outlet for the spare cash you no longer spend on obscure Italian disco records. Every week there are books to buy and study, restaurants to visit, wines to gush over, menus to analyse, rare ingredients to track down and cooking implements to purchase and then justify to the other half: “but of course we need a sous vide machine, dear”.

In 2004, my record company Skint released a tenth anniversary compilation album and made a series of T-shirts to mark the occasion. At that stage I already felt that, as a label, we had lost our edge. So, foolishly, I came up with the self-deprecating slogan “We used to go clubbing, now we like cooking… Balsamic Beats”. Of course, no right-minded person was interested in my rubbish joke and we couldn’t give the things away – but I’d like to think I was simply a few years ahead of my time.